Position Paper: Digitization and the Scholarly Publishing Market in the Context of EU Competition Policy
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Position paper: Digitization and the scholarly publishing market in the context of EU competition policy 28 September 2018 1. Introduction Scholarly (or academic) publishing is a global market whose core products are journals and books, provided in print and digital forms. Scholarly journals, in particular, are the principal mode through which scientists communicate their discoveries and advancements to each other, to research and innovation (R&I)-based industries, and to citizens. Scholarly publishing is therefore the essential pipeline that fuels the science-based societies and economies of Europe. Globally around 2.5 million scholarly articles are published annually by 35,000 journals.1 Frontiers is an award-winning Open Science platform on a mission to make research results openly available to the world, thereby accelerating scientific and technical innovation, social progress and economic growth. Frontiers welcomes the DG Competition call for contributions on ‘Shaping competition policy in the era of digitisation’, initiated by Commissioner Vestager. Frontiers offers this Position Paper to help explain: how the non-open-access, subscription publishing model which currently dominates scholarly publishing is using its position to slow down the adoption of open-access publishing; how business models that provide full and immediate open access (OA) to high- quality scientific articles and data are better for research and innovation (R&I) and economic growth and are also more competitive and transparent; and hence how competition policy could support existing policy initiatives to improve competition in scholarly publishing to the benefit of Europe. 2. Current subscription-based business models are withholding taxpayer-funded research results from full dissemination Subscription-based models prevent harnessing the full benefits of digitization Digitization has disrupted many industries and improved competition, but its full natural consequences and benefits have not yet reached scholarly publishing – an ironic situation considering that the internet was conceived as a channel to disseminate scientific information. The dominant infrastructure for the registration, validation and dissemination of scientific knowledge remains an artificially restricted subscription-based system in which universities pay subscriptions to scholarly publishers to access their scientific journals. This business model, a legacy of the print-based era, imposes “paywalls” that perpetuate the limitations of hard copy dissemination and copyright control into the digital domain – limiting digital access to those who can afford subscription fees. At present, around 80% of all scientific articles are access-protected behind paywalls, and subscription models account for around 95% of the global $10.6 billion revenue from scholarly journals.2 This closed, subscription-based system is a bad deal for society on many levels: • It restricts access to the results of publicly-funded research, a public good, to only a small number of academics working at those institutions that can pay for access via journal subscription, to the detriment of all others, including poorer institutions, start- ups and citizen scientists – thereby largely eliminating the possibility for a level playing field in the dissemination of scientific knowledge. • By limiting knowledge dissemination, it hampers technological innovation. It therefore offers European taxpayers very poor value for money, by curtailing the substantial return on investment that publicly-funded research should yield through innovation.3 • It impedes powerful, digitally-enabled research methods such as text and data mining (TDM: the automated computational analysis of content), which have the potential to transform scholarly research by allowing researchers to exploit the vast and exponentially growing datasets that exist internationally. • It underpins a universally criticized researcher evaluation system – for both researchers and their institutions – that is based on the prestige of the journal in which an article is published, rather than the impact of specific articles and authors. • Its commercial model limits the range of services that libraries can provide to scholars by locking libraries into a limited number of “Big deal” subscription packages (that bundle high and low value journals) that tie up substantial portions of library budgets for multi-year periods to the frustration of librarians and limit the funds available for paying for open-access publication. Subscription-based models are bad for pricing and competition In addition to these detrimental effects, the subscription-based model is also problematic for competition within the scholarly publishing market. This system does entail some degree of competition. Authors are free to choose to submit their manuscripts to any of hundreds of journals and to read these, if they are subscribed. University libraries (the main purchasers of subscriptions) can negotiate “Big Deal” contracts agreements that can – for that institution – broaden access and reduce unit costs of accessing journals or articles compared with regular subscriptions. However, overall the subscription-dominated market is reportedly characterized by low levels of competition4 and high market concentration.5 According to the economist Bo-Christer Björk, the sector shows a relative lack of competitive pressure owing to weak rivalry between major (subscription-based) publishers, weak bargaining power of suppliers (i.e. scholars acting as authors, reviewers and editors) and subscription buyers, and high barriers to entry (i.e. low threats from new market entrants and substitutions).4 Although major subscription-based publishers have invested in digital publishing infrastructures and tools,6 this has not improved competition, lowered prices or widened access to scientific results overall. Rather, upon the transition to internet-based systems, these publishers have used technological, contractual and commercial tactics (see Table below) to limit the diffusion of scientific knowledge while increasing their market dominance and 2 retaining high levels of profitability – twin phenomena tending to indicate that competition in a given market is not working properly. In 2006 a report commissioned by the European Commission DG-Research detailed the competitiveness problems in the scholarly publishing industry and made recommendations, including measures aiming ‘at a level playing field in terms of business models for publishing’.7 This report identified pricing policies, especially the ‘lock-in’ effect of ‘Big deals’, as the key market access problem and issued recommendations (not implemented) to lessen their negative effects on market entry and competition. Indeed, these “Big Deal” contracts can amount to exclusivity or quasi-exclusivity deals. They appear to have the intention, and certainly have the effect, of capturing the whole or almost the whole of library budgets and thereby foreclosing market entry or development by new entrants and other business models. According to a recent survey, most major Big Deal contracts extend over 3 years or more.8 These deals also lack transparency as they are typically subject to non-disclosure agreements. According to a 2017 report published by OPENAIRE 2020 on behalf of the European Commission, the lack of transparency in the subscription market ‘results in a dysfunctional market which serves neither researchers, institutions nor the public interest effectively’.9 3. Open-access publishing business models work Open access fully leverages digitization If the benefits of digitization were fully applied in scholarly publishing: • Every published article would be immediately and fully accessible free of charge to all interested parties, from professional colleagues to citizen scientists and industrial innovators. Every actor in science and R&I would (subject to patent rights for non- academic use) be free to use, reuse and forward the work to colleagues through any channel without fear of infringing legal rights. • Every published article would be database-compatible and would enter a corpus of work in which all articles and data were prepared according to a standard structured format that allows TDM to fully benefit R&I. • Every article would be full-text indexed for optimal discovery and access via Google and other search engines. • The chain of accountability and quality guarantees of the publication’s peer-review validation and production would be certified in a transparent manner. A new generation of high-quality digital OA publishers, operating with a business model different to that of traditional publishers, has demonstrated that these natural benefits of digitization are easily within our reach. As a group these publishers (including Frontiers) have been at the vanguard of innovation, fully leveraging the benefits of the digitization revolution to deliver high-quality OA publishing services at scale, to facilitate data sharing and TDM, and to measure the impact of scholarly publishing through novel – and more relevant – metrics. 3 According to the predominant OA business model, the publisher or platform charges an article processing charge (APC) for the immediate OA publication of a final peer-reviewed article published on the journal or platform website. The OA article (and, increasingly, its data) is then available free-of-charge for anyone to read, copy, share and reuse for scholarly purposes. The guiding principle is that OA publications should be